20% Code Red or Better Now

Another Tuesday, another set of tiers for Covid 19 risk in California. It's a Tuesday thing, BTW, because the state generally updates this report once a week, on Tuesday. The headline news In this week's update is that now only 80% of the state is in Purple Tier. 20% is merely Code Red or better. Here's a graphic I built created from https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/:



Five Things on this week's update:

1. Last week only 13% of the state population was in Code Red or better, so the increase to 20% is significant.
2. One county that was Code Orange backslid to Red, a few others improved to Orange, and one that was Orange improved to Yellow— a first in several months. It's remote Alpine County, though, home to barely more than 1,000 residents.
3. Among the counties improving from purple to red is Imperial County, in the southeast corner of the state (see graphic above). Imperial, home to about 180,000 residents, has a high poverty rate and has been among the hardest-hit areas in the state. It's good to see improvement there.
4. While the chart above looks like it shows more than 20% of the state out of the purple tier, that's because what you're seeing on a map is landmass. Population-wise, several of the most populous counties in the state— Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, San Bernardino— are in purple tier. Orange County has some 3,000,000 residents in a landmass similar in size to 1,117-person Alpine County.
5. I mentioned last week that one visible change in moving from purple to red tier is that restaurants can reopen dine-in service. Well, just because they can doesn't mean they do! Many restaurants in my home area have chosen to continue serving only take-out and delivery customers. For some owners/managers it's explicitly a safety decision; they're not reopening their dining rooms yet because they believe it's not safe enough yet for their employees. For others it's a cost and logistics thing: they don't think it's profitable to operate dine-in service under the constraints. I understand the folks who say it's not yet safe enough— because I agree! I choose not to dine in, and likely will not until I've been fully vaccinated.